Freedom, Justice, and Economics

Now according to prescient Easterbrook and White she’s just one game from the crown.

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again….. The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that–well, lucky you.

Early in American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s stand-in Nathan Zuckerman reflects thus in the midst of recounting his dinner encounter with The Swede. I think Roth/Zuckerman are right that it’s common to undertake this kind of presumption about people, and common to feel all too alive as a result. No doubt people are free to presume like this….

But what’s most interesting to me are the last two sentences, the idea that (i) people might be better off not to presume like this, and (ii) we might have a choice about it (not to mention (iii) that getting people badly wrong might do them injustice). It would be no surprise to me if Roth himself can’t help his long flights of speculation, if upon seeing someone he immediately begins constructing a narrative about him or her, full of family, inner life, and childhood sources of persistent angst. Roth’s objective in doing so is presumably to entertain, either to entertain a present or future audience, or just to entertain himself. If I were to launch into such a flight of speculation about, say, a professional acquaintance, I could be detrimentally distracted from the substantive content of our interactions. It would be better for me to concentrate on the equilibrium we’re discussing than to imagine whether his parents made his favorite baked ziti often enough when he was a kid.

… So to react to Roth’s last sentence above, I guess I think many of us are “lucky”– but lucky in a deliberate way, lucky to be able to concentrate on what matters to us about other people, lucky to be able to concentrate on the substance and character they choose to put forth. And if “unlucky,” we have a choice about how to speculate, too. I most often choose to speculate sympathetically– and if wrong, sure, plenty content to be alive.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s thoughtful Op-Ed in today’s Times, as part of a collection of pieces relating to the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, resonates. Like my earlier post it highlights the differences among Jews, and it takes the important further step of explaining how and why those differences can lead to practical difficulties in policy-making.

On the specific question of what to do about the settlements, I had once considered the notion that Israel could simply choose to abandon them militarily: choose a new boundary of control, and pull back to that line. After establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Jews choosing to remain in settlements there could be subject to the laws in force there, and hold all the attendant rights and responsibilities. Relocation support could be offered, to facilitate settlers’ removal to Israel, ensuring that ideologues would predominate among the remaining settlers.

And those remaining would feel even more like they were manning sparse outposts in a threatened land. Moreover, especially lacking support from the Israeli military, direct conflicts with Palestinians would be likely. Some of the remaining settlers would make a tenuous peace; others would test the law-enforcement powers of the new Palestine; and some would be outmatched in outright battle.

I had once considered the “just pull out” option for four reasons. First, it’s obvious that creating a territorially viable Palestine requires either the elimination (and hence the relocation of the settlers to Israel) or absorption (as considered) of many existing settlements. Second, many settlers would not want to leave, for practical and ideological reasons (like the ones who were distraught about departing Gaza at the time of Israel’s pullout). Third, it is important for states, to mature, to have minorities whose rights must be protected.

Fourth is the scary one. I presume that the Palestinians, like any newly independent people, will feel more thrill about their independence if it comes with what they can call a victory.  Armed clashes with recalcitrant settlers– which would be bloody and awful– would presumably result in Palestinian victories that would be satisfying for them.

My now clear opinion– against the military abandonment of settlements, and of settlers who choose not to accept the relocation support– mostly stems from greater fear about Reason #4.  Israel would not be able to stick to a commitment to abandon settlers; settlers would not submit to the authority of a Palestinian state; and many of the 268,000 settlers would fight ferociously, and be heavily armed.  In short, the resulting war between the settlers and the Palestinians over the West Bank would be a disaster.

… so I return to the familiar practical questions, which are implicit in pieces like Goldberg’s:  how can consensus build to dismantle settlements, how can large settlements be incorporated into reasonable boundaries, how can two functioning, peaceful states emerge?

To the Map of the (financial) Market, it’s a thrill to add a new brilliant graphic, this map of the market for goods and services.  (The latter loads faster, too.)

Hooray.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, construction plans for a library were influenced by an unusual consideration: the shadow the building might cast. Established in 1876, the Morrow Plots are the longest continuous agricultural demonstration plots in the world. Since it would have been unfortunate to interfere with their sunlight, the UIUC library was built adjacent to them but out of the way–underground.

… throughout Africa, says a wise former teacher in The Gambia, would make a world of difference.  Why not flood schools with Dr. Seuss?

Most papers written by university students are seen by two people:  the student and her TA.  I think this should change radically:  the default should be that all student work is published to the web.  This would give students output to point their friends and family to; it would encourage students to take more pride in their written work; and it would promote discourse about class subjects among students who could read each other’s work.

The technology is there.  The students are more than talented and diligent enough that  we should have faith in them and their writing.  How could universal web publication be made to happen?

We all make thousands of small decisions each day–whether to snooze a few extra minutes in the morning, how long a workout to have, whether to snack on carrots or cookies, whether to have decaf or regular coffee–that may affect our immediate and future well-being. We get some immediate feedback on some of those decisions (geez, those carrots were tasty), but detailed quantitative feedback on immediate and delayed effects is challenging.

Many such decisions have immediate, identifiable, bioelectrical and biochemical signatures. Imagine a device that automatically tracked and uploaded this information, standard metrics of body function (e.g., pulse, breathing rate, temperature, bp), and manually-inputted subjective measures of well-being (e.g., headache, euphoria, anxiety, zone) and productivity. Imagine using all this information and a decent stats package to make inferences about the effects–specific to oneself–of many of life’s small decisions. Many of the inferences would be obvious and well-known: sleeping very little makes you sluggish; eating carrots makes you feel virtuous; talking with dear old friends makes you elegiac, reflective, and happy.

For a device that would track lots of bio-indicators automatically and make it easy to track food intake, exercise info, and subjective variables on the fly, I doubt I’d blink about paying $10,000. Such a device would give me far better tools for enhancing my own productivity and well-being. Maybe my dear old friends also profoundly believe in me, motivating me to do more good; those carrots can give me spates of indigestion, making them less virtuous; and blogging occasionally loosens the chains and accelerates my other writing. I’d like to run the stats, controlling for daylight hours, age, the weather, the number of seminars I’ve been attending, and my overall workload, see the results, and adjust accordingly. Explicit experimentation could come soon after. Just a 1% increase in productivity would make the gadget pay well within my lifetime.

All trip long, the famous Swiss meticulousness did not disappoint.

• Most chalets were of the traditional style, with shutters, overhanging roofs, and a prominent gable or two; flower gardens exploded autumn’s pretense with color.
• I could set my watch by the trains, the buses, and the local shops’ opening hours.
• By homes, small cow sheds, and stopping points along major trails, wood was invariably stacked, cross-hatched, covered with corrugated iron, awaiting its chance to warm a hearth.
• Bergweg signposts, white-red-white, stood proudly along mountain trails, ready to remain visible in feet of snow to come.
• As the train from Gstaad descends into Zweisimmen, it makes a hairpin turn in a tunnel.  My wife thinks the engineers were drinking one day and challenged each other to pull off the u-ee.  If so, such gambling is common:  from Gstaad to Montreux we were treated to additional 180’s on buried tracks.

All this impressiveness noted, toward the end of our hike from Lenk to Lauenen, we passed a small old man in a stocking cap fighting to saw a 2×4 by hand.  The place was no idyll for the poor, and a century had somehow passed him by.